“He with you or you with him?”
Would this never end? Why did he need to know this? She felt she was entitled to some tactical lying.
“Mutual. It was a mutual breakup. Look, all I want is, like, five sleeping pills, just so I can sleep the nights before the exams.”
“How about if I give you three?” he offered.
This was insane. Were they actually bargaining over the number of sleeping pills he’d prescribe for her? Maybe they’d split the difference and he’d give her four.
“Sure,” Lizzie answered wearily. “Three is fine.”
Dr. Teacher stared at her stonily. “I’m going to give you a prescription for five pills,” he said sternly, “but I’m going to put down on your permanent record . . . your permanent record,” he emphasized, “that you’re suffering from insomnia due to an unsuccessful love affair.”
Lizzie left the clinic with five sleeping pills and what, even in her misery, she recognized was a terrific and endlessly reusable sentence.
“Where is your permanent record, anyway?” James asked when they’d returned from Cleveland and she told him and Marla about the visit to Dr. Teacher. “Do you think it’s what Saint Peter looks over when he decides whether you’re fit for heaven or bound for hell?”
Or Marla’s mother would send her a particularly unattractive sweater as a gift, one with, say, reindeer on it. Obviously this fashion blooper on Mrs. Cantor’s part would end up on her permanent record.
James wondered if good things also went on your permanent record. “I won the fourth-grade spelling bee. Do you think that’s on it?”
“Gosh,” Marla said, “I think that’s the year I lost because I couldn’t figure out how to spell ‘niece.’ I remember asking myself if the i-before-e rule worked in this case, or if niece was an exception, like in ‘neighbor.’ Not, as I came to find out, an exception. Do you think that’s on my permanent record?”
“Do you think the permanent records are kept in a huge bank vault in Washington? Who has the key? What if they lost it? Would that go on their permanent record? Would they have to start setting up all-new permanent records, sort of a clean slate for everyone?” Lizzie wondered.
They could go on for hours like this. And frequently did.
*?A Letter from Jack?*
It was December 8, and Lizzie’s last class on the last day of classes before finals week was just ending. It was also, if anyone was counting (and Lizzie was), six months to the day since Jack kissed her good-bye and vanished from her life. After the bowling debacle, she had tried to cut back on her marijuana intake, but wasn’t quite as successful as she might have wanted. Weed was a blessing and a curse, Lizzie thought, stoned, as she stood up from her desk and stuffed the Collected Chaucer into her backpack. Pot took away the immediate pain of Jack’s absence because all that she experienced in the present moment seemed so compelling that the fact of the loss of Jack was much less interesting than seeing the shape and shifting colors of the emptiness that surrounded that fact. And pot gave her so much more: she saw, for example, the scaffolding of crossword-puzzle grids. Certain words, like “ontogeny,” “regency,” and “exculpation,” delighted her, and despite having no idea when or even if she’d heard them before, she knew their meanings because of the sounds they made as they sang in her mind. When she was stoned she could study her toes, which she normally hated, for hours, and realize, as she wiggled them appreciatively, that in fact they weren’t any uglier than anyone else’s. They were just toes, and hers, and, in their own specific way, were quite lovely. When she was high she could tune out the voices in her head more easily, although one terrible night when she sat around with James and Marla, all of them high, the announcers started speaking in a slow, deadly voice. Every criticism was enunciated clearly: Horrible. Ugly. Stupid. Crazy. Inept. Selfish. Clumsy. Evil. It felt as though they were pelting her with bits of ice that had been sharpened to a point at one end.
Lizzie also knew that when you were stoned, all you could do was be stoned. You couldn’t study because you were hyperalert to every sight or sound. Classes were a joke because there were too many distractions. Being so stoned all the time didn’t have a salutary effect on her grades. She was perilously close to failing all her courses. She’d managed to eke out a C in her geography and grammar classes in the summer (blessed be the sleeping pills), but this quarter she’d taken a full load of five courses. Even the Chaucer, which she’d looked forward to because Jack had once told her how much he admired the teacher, didn’t hold her interest, whether she was stoned or unstoned. She’d tried it both ways. And without the pot the pain came back two-and threefold, a dreadful rebound effect from exiting the stoned world.
It was going to be a long weekend, trying to catch up with the readings so that she had a decent chance of passing an exam in anything but sadness. Already, most of what the teacher had said about Chaucer, his life and times, and his poems had faded away. She could remember only the first three or four lines from the Prologue (although she could recite them in a credible if midwestern-inflected Middle English). Her major takeaway from Chaucer’s life was his peccadilloes (or worse) with Cecily Champaign, whom Dr. Ragland referred to cheerfully as “Bubbles.” Bubbles Champaign. Lizzie did love that, stoned and unstoned. Her Literary Theory and second-year French classes had both become a blank. Did the semioticians have a theory of despair? Could she say it in French? Worse, she couldn’t at this moment even bring to mind the two other classes she was taking fall quarter.
Lizzie found herself outside, although she had no actual memory of leaving the classroom building. Indian summer had made an appearance after a chilly fall in Ann Arbor, and the brownish-colored leaves of the maples were still drifting off the trees. They made a satisfying crunch as she walked back to her apartment. It was warm enough for people to open their windows; she could hear music coming from the dorms. Lizzie stopped and listened to a woman singing a lightly jazzed-up version of “I’m Going to Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter.” She suddenly got a dazzling idea. Lizzie decided she was going to go home, sit right down at her desk, write herself a letter, and make believe it came from Jack. Reading it, she’d learn why, exactly, he never came back. Brilliant.
She dumped her backpack and jacket on the couch and sat down at her desk and began writing.
Dearest Lizzie (because you are):